My Decade in Music So Far: Jonah Bromwich

*This week, Pitchfork shared lists featuring the best albums and tracks of the decade so far. We asked Pitchfork writers and editors to share a favorite song and album that didn't make the list, along with a music highlight and their personal Top 10s or 20s. Check back for more installments of My Decade in Music So Far.
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It makes total sense to me that this record, Blu’s best (despite what backpacker types will tell you about Below the Heavens), didn’t make the list. The music here comes across like an alternative of what rap could have developed into, if it hadn’t split into a million tiny pieces along the way. The whole thing is powered by primo Los Angeles beat scene production; Blu slashing through the noise with incredible ease, riding beats that would render most rappers dumb. It’s a great record. But its combination of sounds and influences is unique, and doesn’t gesture towards other, more widespread musical trends of the decade.

The album is complexly lyrical, with the Dumile-style internal rhyming that’s become a staple of the genre’s rappity-rappers. But it’s also quietly emotive, and raw; not Drake/Kanye-style honesty-as-self-indulgence, but calmer, more self-posessed. Blu has never gotten it together enough to give us another record like this, but this warped, alternative-universe look at how the rap world might have evolved is like nothing else, a cult record with the potential to have an enormous influence on the post-internet generation, for which it functions as a perfect soundtrack.

I’m a Dum Dum Girls stan. I think they’re one of the great bands of the last decade, and the pop force of their debut album I Will Be is on par, for me*,* with much more touted debuts like The Strokes’s Is This It? “It Only Takes One Night” isn’t even my favorite song on the record, but it is the sound of the ceiling cracking, an anthem dedicated to the idea that everything can change in a single moment.

Musical Highlight of the Last Five Years: My friend was visiting from Wisconsin and I had free passes to a rap showcase, featuring Action Bronson, Flatbush Zombies and A$AP Rocky, and Tanya Morgan. I had moved to New York in January, and while I was thrilled to be in the city, I had a shitty job and a serious lack of friends. I was spending as much time telling myself that I was having fun in New York as I was actually having it. The bright side was that the writing I had done in Wisconsin had started to pay off and I was reviewing concerts for The Village Voice, the best medicine to remedy the dull days of work at my PR firm, and my subsequent month or two of joblessness.

And then, I got a job, my best friend visited, and we saw Action Bronson tear the goddamn house down, throwing weed, steaks, and shoes into the crowd, in what’s become a token show of generosity. Blue Chips had come out in the spring and we knew every word. Driving back over the Williamsburg bridge, seeing the city and just having had that experience felt like my real introduction to New York. I’ll always remember that concert, that drive, and that elation.